Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [34]
Dag drew up Copperhead and nodded. “How de’.”
The man stood. “Good day to you”—a slight hesitation, as he looked Dag up and down—“patroller.” An anxious look crossed his face. “Courier, are you?”
“No, sir, just stopping by. I was hoping you could tell me where to find your camp captain, and who’s holding that post these days.”
The young woman frowned at his hook, wrapped with Copperhead’s reins, and he lowered it a trifle. The man directed Dag to look for Amma Osprey in the third tent to the left past the split oak tree, and Dag, not lingering to get tangled in talk, pressed Copperhead on. A last curious ground-flick touched him. Pass, friend.
Both ease and anxiety knotted in him as he rode by the familiar domestic sights of a Lakewalker camp. Tents peeked through trees, the traditional log structures with hide awnings rolled up on their fourth, open sides, mostly looking southwest to the river. Stands of fruit trees, beehives, homely washing on lines. Smoke rising from chimneys, the smells of cooking and preserving. From a distance, a less pleasant whiff of tanning hides. Half a dozen black-and-white speckled chickens squawked and fluttered across Copperhead’s path, and the horse tossed his head and snorted.
Downslope near the shore, a couple of men were building a good-sized narrow boat on a rack, hammering in pegs. Twenty-five feet long, double-prowed, broad in the middle, clearly meant for the river trade—its boards looked mill-sawn. A few of the newer tent-cabins, too, were built of such planks; the farmers at Pearl Bend or Possum Landing must have put in a sawmill on one of the feeder creeks.
Dag spotted patrol headquarters by the array of hitching posts in front, and the lack of washing and cook-smoke. The four-sided cabin had Glassforge glass windows, presently hooked open on what had to be one of the last warm days of the season. Dag dismounted, tied Copperhead, and let his groundsense dart out once more. Two folks inside right now, both ground-closed; a woman’s voice, sharp, drifted out the open windows.
“If we upped and moved the camp and the ferry a mile upriver—better, five miles—we wouldn’t have these blighted clashes.”
“And lose the rest of the business from the straight road to the Bend’s new ferry? We’re hurting already,” returned another woman, with a rougher, warmer voice. Not young.
“Let it go. We don’t need a wagon road for our patrols and pack trains.”
“Amma, three-fourths of the camp’s coin comes from farmers using our ferry. And flows right back to them. Everything from flour to horseshoe nails comes from the Bend goods-sheds these days.”
“As it should not. Proves my point, I’d say.”
A glum silence fell. When it remained unbroken, Dag stepped up onto the wooden porch and knocked, furling his groundsense more tightly around him.
“Is that you, Verel?” the first voice called. “Come on in. When are you going to let those two—ah.” A tough, tall, strongly built older woman, one haunch half-up on a plank table, wheeled as Dag ducked through the door and touched his hand to his temple in polite greeting. He had no trouble identifying her as the camp’s patrol captain, given her riding trousers, worn leather vest, long steel knife at her belt, and harassed look. The cabin held the usual headquarters clutter of strewn gear, with maps and record books stuffed on overflowing shelves. The other woman, of like age but rather plumper and wearing skirts, might be some clan head; she seemed to bear herself with scarcely less authority.
“Now what?” said the camp captain, in a voice of accumulated